Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I got into a discussion about polar sea ice in the comments to my post Where Is The Climate Emergency?. In the process I noticed some mysteries.
To start with, here’s the Arctic sea ice area record.
Figure 1. Sea ice area anomaly, Arctic
The mystery for me in this record is the decade from about 1998 to 2008. There’s very little month-to-month variation in the record over that period, and the ice area is dropping steadily … followed by ~ thirteen years of very large month-to-month variations with little overall change in ice area. Is this real? Is it an artifact? Unknown.
Then we have the Antarctic ice area record …
Figure 2. Antarctic ice area anomaly
Here, the obvious mystery is, just what the heck happened around 2015-2017 to cause the Antarctic ice area to drop so precipitously?
And finally, putting both poles together, we get the following:
Figure 3. Global, Arctic, and Antarctic sea ice areas.
Figure 3 reveals a number of mysteries.
• There is no overall increase or decrease in total global sea ice for the entire ~ forty-year period from November 1978 until 2015 or so. This is despite increasing CO2 and general gradual global warming. Why?
• Up until 2015 or so, when the Arctic had more ice area, the Antarctic had less ice area, and vice versa. Why?
• Around 2015, after forty years of global ice stability, both Arctic and Antarctic ice areas dropped, leading to a very visible drop in global ice area. Why the drop, and why then and not earlier or later?
• After the drop, the global ice area seems to be starting to recover … again, why?
• At the North Pole, there is an ocean covered with sea ice. At the South Pole, there’s a high rocky plateau covered with land ice and surrounded by sea ice. Yet despite these totally different situations, the area of sea ice is almost exactly the same at both poles … say what?
Other than saying that equal ice areas at the poles MAY be a result of my hypothesis that the climate is a giant thermoregulated heat engine with a host of emergent phenomena that tend to stabilize the temperatures and equalize the hemispheres, I fear I have no answers to these curious polar questions … all comments welcome.
I will say that I am overjoyed that the world of climate contains far more mysteries than answers …
When nothing is for sure, we remain alert, perennially on our toes. It is more exciting not to know which bush the rabbit is hiding behind than to behave as though we knew everything.
—Carlos Castaneda, in The Teachings of Don Juan
My best to all adventurers in this most marvelous universe,
w.
You Might Have Heard This Before: I can defend my own words. I can’t defend your interpretation of my words, particularly when I don’t know what you’re referring to. So please, when you comment, quote the exact words you are discussing. Thanks.
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As a 30 yr plus student, observer and teacher of environmental issues, including a stint at Columbia’s LDEO I work with key data that makes clear observable changes in the cryosphere. What makes sense to me and my colleagues is the general operating principles behind the noise and the kernals of truth.
Since you do not seem to define what you observe; i.e.sea ice cover, sea ice thickness, sea ice volume, etc. I can only conclude that you have wandered into the weeds. WUWT?
What is certain is that we’ve lost or are loosing every glacier except for two.(James Blalock); polar amplification occurred in the Arctic almost a decade ago, occurred in the Antarctic more recently; loss of permafrost (with release of methane) has been increasing exponentially for decades (International Permafrost Assoc, National Geographic); the Keeling Curve is consistently moving upward (currently at 419.4 with 350 ppm acknowledged as the safe upper limit (Scripps, DOE, etc.); sea levels are rising (NASA, European Space Agency, Chesapeake Bay Foundation, US Navy.)
It is well known that, as of now, there is no way to reverse this tipped point, along with nearly a dozen more. Recent research indicates humanity has less than a decade before significant die back (McPherson, etc.).
We would do best to immediately reduce carbon emissions starting with eliminating the 65% of energy waste, if only to buy time for the children. Listen to the chidren’s voices, including Greta Thunberg’s because they are the ONLY authorities in this matter. We adults who have screwed up everything have nothing much to contribute to the “solution” except for supporting the children. When your homes and businesses achieve net-zero CO2 status you may be worth listening to. Roll up your sleeves, shut up, and get to work as if our livs depend on it. THEY DO!
There is no way to reverse the tipping point but we have to reduce carbon emissions? Makes no sense.
Larry Menkes CSBA May 5, 2021 9:33 am
Since EVERY graph and EVERY caption in my post clearly says “Sea Ice Area“, I can only conclude that you are so hopelessly biased that you’ve gone blind.
As a result, I read no further. Guess what? I’m not interested in what a blind man says about how things look to him.
w.
Willis, I love how you go all Big Billy Goat Gruff on the troll living under the bridge.
P.S. I learned from William Happer that Gretta Thunberg is the great grand daughter of Svante Arrhenius. I know you don’t like videos but others may enjoy.
https://youtu.be/jIMpjh_7-bw
Hahaha, you had me for a while. Good parody — it can’t be serious, unless it’s a child’s post….
Ja. Ja. It is the 3 M’s at it again. It is either the man, the method or the machine….
”thirteen years of very large month-to-month variations with little overall change in ice area. Is this real? Is it an artifact? Unknown. ”
This is in my opinion just a result of seasonal adjustment. Arctic ice formation (and melting) are very rapid in the autumn/and spring. This means that the area compared year on year vary much just because of freezing/melting delay of a week or so. Imagine two years ice area as to sinus curves. Identical in amplitude but shifted a week. The differnce from one year to the next (vertical distance) is very large. (this year was exceptional with area difference of a million sq km just because of the late ice formation).
When the seasonal effect is calculated it will some year subtract the ”normal” Ice area to get the seasonally adjusted area. A year with the ice formation delayed and subtracting the average seasonal
effect will produce wildly swinging results.
Probably there has been a number of years with one seasonal pattern and then a period of another pattern. This will produce exactly the effect that is shown in the graphs with quite years and wildly swinging years.
Oscar K
Or the “data” is garbage?!
Castaneda? You must be a refugee from the 60s. I bet you read Dune, V, Cat’s Cradle and At Play in the Fields of the Lord too.
Castaneda? I read several of his books with great pleasure. At least: very interesting to look at the same world in another way.
The polar see-saw effect, as the solar wind weakened from 1995, the Arctic warmed, and the Antarctic cooled.
I followed the progression of cyclone Debbie down the east coast of Australia in March 2017. It dumped a lot of water on the east coats. A patch of warm water went all the way down the east coast of Australia.
I noticed that the sea ice extent in September 2017 was lower than it had been for some years.
When you look at SST anomalies around Antarctica in September 2017 you see all three oceans had warm water at the ice interface – up to 5C warmer than usual.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2017/09/03/1200Z/ocean/surface/currents/overlay=sea_surface_temp_anomaly/orthographic=66.75,-85.85,369/loc=-51.265,-46.680
Literally like a ring of fire.
I figure the loss of ice is the alignment of the three ocean circulations and the global impact of the 2015-16 El Nino.
Willis,
How did you remove the seasonal effects? Just out of curiosity I downloaded the file
Sea_Ice_index_Daily_Extent_G02135_v3.0.xlsx from the website you list and if I take
for example a simple average of the Southern Hemisphere daily sea ice extent for 2010 I get 12.1 million square kilometres. However in Fig. 3. your value is below 10. Similarly all of your values appear to be several million square kilometres below what a simple average would give.
As for your question about why the Northern and Southern extents are so similar the answer would be just luck. The Arctic sea ice extent clearly can’t grow significantly since the arctic is surrounded by land and 100% of the sea is already frozen. In contrast the south pole is on land and the Antarctic is quite large so the amount of sea ice is limited as well. A more sensible metric would be the total amount of ice cover in each hemisphere and that would again be roughly equal because the earth is a sphere.
Izaak, you’re looking at extent and I’m analyzing area.
Regards,
w.
Thank you for another wonderful logical article! Solid questions!
A) Remember, for decades, “sea ice” reports ware provided by a “service” by interested parties, e.g., Denmark..
B) The look of the sea ice chart looks exactly like a chart would that combines and joins many different sources.
Ba) For a few years, I accessed to the experimental the “NexSat- NRL/JPSS Next-Generation Weather Satellite Demonstration Project”
C) The deep plummet in Arctic sea ice is right around the time that multiple groups of people got serious about their versions of sea ice.
D) Modern “sea ice area” reports are selectively initiated as starting in 1978. Sea ice has been reported for many years prior to 1978 with Norway, Denmark, Canada and Russia very intent on knowing sea ice estimates.
1) Suggestion: Identify actual sources. i.e., exactly what the various services used for sources to prepare their estimates.
Along with the granularity and methods that drove their estimates.
Frankly, it is quite hard to tell white clouds from white sea ice.
2) Life is far more important than feeding WUWT’s audience abyssal hunger for knowledge.
Enjoy Life!
The Arctic data looks almost certainly due to bad calculations, if not deliberate fudging. A large change tends to look less noisy, but that sticks out like the dog’s proverbials. Are there changes in satellites that coincide with the start and finish?
Here are some changes l have noticed in the NH snow extent that maybe linked to the changes in the Arctic sea ice extent since 2008.
1 Since around 2004 there has been a clear sharp decline in the snow extent during April to June.
2 While roughly from 2000 and onward there has been a noticeable increase in snow cover during the Fell.
3 l have kept a first snow record in my local area here in England since 1977, and from around 2010 to the present l have noticed there has been a noticeable increase in the year to year swing away from the average date during that time. But with the average date remaining roughly the same during that time.
The first thing I would be looking at is whether the method of measurement changed. I have no idea how to do this or whether it did, but it certainly looks like you would want to verify the data as first step.
After all, this is Climate Science…
Dear Willis
“Other than saying that equal ice areas at the poles MAY be a result of my hypothesis that the climate is a giant thermoregulated heat engine with a host of emergent phenomena that tend to stabilize the temperatures and equalize the hemispheres, I fear I have no answers to these curious polar questions … all comments welcome”.
Well you could say that Willis, but it would be similar to trying to paint the whole side of your house with one brush stroke. You are partially right without understanding why.
Equatorial / low latitude convection, the volume, timing and duration of intrusion into the atmosphere controls more than is understood. It has a global effect. This is especially obvious between the months of May to early October when another separate phenomenon causes a multiplying effect on convection intrusion.
Without this convection zonal winds would diminish considerably, as we find out every now and then. They call it SSW. 2002 was a classic year. Also of importance is the difference in volume of convection between the SH and NH in any given year. The hemispheric balance.
I call it “Atmospheric Entanglement”.
Lets look very simply at a couple of years.
2014 was the peak Antarctic year for sea ice area.
A nice steady rise from the 4th Sept to the peak on 20.9.14, then a decline. Go to Charctic to see the Ice profile.
Below is the Zonal wind speed at 70mb. 70mb acts as the default average for all of the heights measured. Note how the wind speed drops on the same date as the sea ice increases. The peak ice stops increasing and reduces as the wind rises again. The ice gross area is maintained due to falling Zonal winds and calmer sea surface. When the zonal winds reduce – Cold air flows from the Antarctic continent onto the sea / sea ice assisting the sea ice formation.
https://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/meteorology/figures/merra2/wind/u60s_70_2014_merra2.pdf
Compare that to 2016
A rapid rise in zonal wind speed coinciding with a decrease in sea ice.
No cold air flowing outward – sea surface disturbance
https://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/meteorology/figures/merra2/wind/u60s_70_2016_merra2.pdf
It becomes more evident when you move away from averages and get into the daily detail.
There is more to it than the simple explanation provided here.
Thanks for your great posts, it gets us thinking.
With regards
Martin
Thanks for your great job Willis! Debunking all this propaganda.
I found this paper very intresting regarding “Little ice age”: A perspective from Iceland. Where they show some ice index observations from 1650-1990.
1851-1990.
Here is a link to the paper:
“Little Ice Age” Research: A Perspective from Iceland (springer.com)
I have been looking for something that might give a clue about why these patterns appeared.
The data looked at by Willis is for sea ice. That’s basically all there is ice-wise in the Arctic, but the Antarctic has lots of ice on land. Did the Antarctic land ice do the same thing in 2015-17? If so, that might indicate something affecting the whole region. Answer: no. Verified by looking for an increase in sea level rise rate: there wasn’t one. This thing appears to be limited to sea ice only.
So what about the Southern Ocean – did something happen there? Well, there’s quite a jump in the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) around 2014-18.
http://www.nerc-bas.ac.uk/public/icd/gjma/newsam.1957.2007.seas.txt
There were previous spikes, but they didn’t hang around the way the 2014-18 increase did. Maybe that’s a useful clue?
What about clouds? With around 90% cloud cover, the Southern Ocean may well be quite sensitive to variation in cloud cover (that’s because a small change in cloud cover is a much larger change in non-cloud-cover). I could have looked up the cloud data if my computer hadn’t died recently, A quick search hasn’t produced anything I could use, but I did come across this paper
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2018JD028505
It’s called “The Combined Influence of Observed Southern Ocean Clouds and Sea Ice on Top‐of‐Atmosphere Albedo” but in a sense it isn’t that, because it seems to assume that “cloud cover and opacity” only change in “response to Southern Ocean sea ice variability”. I’ve come across this a lot – papers assuming that cloud only changes in response to the things they are looking at, never that clouds may have a role in driving things. So when I have replaced my computer – hopefully soon – maybe I will be able to take a look at cloud cover and opacity over the Southern Ocean. If anyone wants to get there tirst, please do. I would much rather someone saved me the work!
If you are basing your assessment on just that chart, well, I think you need to look at things in more detail…
You need to consider changes in ice thickness and volume, influence of snow cover, feedback, effect of warming peripheral oceans…
Look at the way maximums have lowered as well as minimums… and much more.
You could start here:
Arctic sea ice – Arctic Sea Ice : Forum (arctic-sea-ice.net)
If WHO is basing their assessment on just WHICH chart? I ask people to QUOTE THE EXACT WORDS they’re talking about, and I do it specifically for folks like you. Without knowing who or what chart you’re talking about, your comment is just meaningless drivel.
w.
Interesting informative post as usual Willis, many thanks.
A couple of thoughts: Arctic/Antarctic ice areas are of similar orders of magnitude but vastly disparate in volume. I don’t have hard data but Arctic floating ice is a few meters thick while Antarctic mostly land supported ice can be thousands of meters thick. Even including Greenland the disparity between North and South Polar ice masses must differ by a couple of orders of magnitude. Is there data on their respective ice volume seasonal variations?
Oh! and a tip for our favorite troll Griff: all that extra ice mass at the South pole is perhaps why it’s always at the bottom of the world map.
Cheers
Mike
It would have been more informative if the ice anomaly was expressed in percent relative to average.
That also goes for ice in Greenland. I think the reason the alarmist never uses perscent for this is to make the graphs more ambiguous. After all, the volume of ice in Greenland today is just 0.3% lower than 120 years ago. That’s not frightning enough for the audience.
Ryddegutt May 5, 2021 3:28 am
That’s what Figure 3 shows.
Regards,
w.
Ok.Then the graphs make sense, but the text and scale on the y-axe is a bit confusing if it’s percentage.
Thanks for the answer and thanks for an interesting post.
Regards
One thing that comes to mind is advice several years ago that satellite sensors could not distinguish melt water on top of ice from ocean water. (There are areas of melt water on top of ice, I think those will vary with drifted snow and tilting of ice from floes pushing into each other due wind.)
Perhaps someday they will be able to.
Erps, “….distinguish melt water on top of ice from open water.”
I also note that ice in the Arctic ocean varies in thickness, there’s much first year ice but there is multi-year ice – contrary to alarmist claims it does not all
I do not know granularity of measurement – edges of ice floes may be jagged so hard to measure.
And idly thinking, I wonder what is on top of the mountains in the High Arctic – how much ice.
This article says it has an ice cap today, it and the main Wikipedia article show glacier flows. (The Arctic is generally dry.)
Flying past Axel Heiberg Island one night in a Hercules air freighter I took some comfort from the sound of four thrusters purring out there on the wings. (AKA C-130 with four turboprop engines.) I was only up there in winter, perhaps the moon was out, perhaps starlight is enough to see those big rocks given reflection from snow cover of the landscape.
(Islands in the southwestern Arctic are quite low, whereas Axel Heiberg is 7250 feet high. It is further north, almost 80N, on the west side of Ellesmere Island which is to the west of Greenland. WUWT readers may recognize weather base Alert, at 82.5N.)
Another article says Dorset people once lived there (Paleo-Eskimos). (They were displaced by Inuit from Alaska (Aleuts) and Siberia moving across the top of North America into Greenland – called Thule people there but many families are related between Canada and Greenland, between three and one millennia ago, no inhabitants today. (There are Inuit in Resolute Bay Nanavut, which is at 74.7N, they were transplanted there from somewhere south by the government of Canada, they do OK there.)
Willis, perhaps looking at the aftermath of all big el nino’s may hold a track:
Last big el nino had the warm waters veering mainly south instead of north. (Saw that on a mainstream global warming makes el nino’s worse video)
Not sure if that volume would be enough to make such a big difference?